Can ‘toxic’ fans cancel a billion-dollar show?
Amazon says global streams for the second season of flagship series The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power are less than half the total for the Tolkien adaptation’s first season, raising eyebrows over the future of a television series often touted as the most expensive ever.
The second series of the Prime Video show reached 55 million viewers worldwide ahead of the release of its final episode at 5pm (AEST) on October 3. The first instalment of the five-season show, which The Hollywood Reporter has estimated will cost $US1 billion ($1.5 billion) in total, has now been viewed by more than 150 million people.
Charlie Vickers as Sauron in season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video
Last week, Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon MGM Studios, told a Prime Video presentation in London that the studio expected the same growth for season two it experienced for season one.
Data from Nielsen showed that from August 26 to September 1, the week the first three episodes of the new season became available, US viewers streamed 1 billion minutes across all eleven available episodes. That was down from 1.3 billion minutes in the week only the first three episodes of season one were available two years prior.
The show attracted 25 million viewers when it premiered in 2022, the biggest single day in the platform’s history. But it also drew the ire of “toxic” fans, some critical of the show’s dialogue and changes to source material, others its racially diverse casting, prompting the cast to release a statement condemning the racism its members had experienced. Actors from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy also spoke out in support.
Liam Burke, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Swinburne University, notes the impact of critical online commentary. “There is a certain subset of fandom which for one reason or another, whether it’s all-female Ghostbusters or a Lord of the Rings series that focuses on an elf that isn’t white, will do videos and social media posts and review bomb – and that’s toxic fandom.”
Burke says toxic fandoms are real, and fantasy fans, as early adopters of the internet, can “wield disproportionate power”.
“That negative word of mouth or negative word of keystroke can ripple far beyond communities, where it can begin to sour wider perceptions of a show,” he says.
Amazon briefly suspended the show’s rating on the platform in 2022 after reports of online “review bombing”, where fans get together to post negative reviews to bring down a show’s rating, leading to the audience satisfaction score on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes dropping to 37 per cent. The website’s Popcornmeter for season one now sits at 38 per cent, while season two has a score of 58 per cent, still a “stale” rating according to the site’s classifications.
Meanwhile, critical reviews for both seasons have been generally positive, with the rating on the site’s Tomatometer, which aggregates published reviews by critics, at 85 per cent for season two, up from 83 per cent for season one. In this masthead, Michael Idato has praised the second season’s lunge from an “initially intriguing story ... into something more compelling”.
The Rings of Power premiere was the first time Amazon shared streaming statistics for any of its shows. The company said it could not share the numbers for the opening day of season two, or any regional streaming figures. As of October 3, the show was the No.1 streamed show on Prime Video in Australia.
Marc C-Scott, a lecturer in screen media at Victoria University, says it was hanging on to subscribers, and not fans’ or critics’ responses, which guided the big streamers’ strategies.
“The studio would be looking to see, OK, not only is it getting them subscribers, but how long is it hanging on to those subscribers, and potentially what other content they’re looking at.”
C-Scott says a decline in viewers could impact the investment in a show, but only once a show’s subscriber-retaining powers evaporated, would they “look at different paths to either sell that acquisition off ... or they’ll just basically pull the pin on it”.
In 2017, Amazon Studios beat Netflix to pay $US250 million for the rights to adapt Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings for the small screen, committing to five seasons.
Amazon beat other streaming giants to pay $US250 million for the rights to JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in 2017. Credit: Prime Video
While a third season has not been officially confirmed, show runners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne signed a new three-year deal in February and have already previewed their hopes for the direction of the story, which portrays the events preceding Jackson’s films and The Hobbit adaptations.
Amazon has said the show’s launch had driven more global Prime sign-ups than any of its previous content. C-Scott says the appeal of buying the rights to a franchise like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars was not just the pre-existing fan base.
“They’ve already got a starting point, but the other end of it is that it allows a new fan base to potentially take on hold.”
Burke, a Tolkien fan, says he was halfway through season two of The Rings of Power, which he thought had produced “some good stuff, and some not good stuff”. He says it was unfair to compare it against Jackson’s movies, a “unicorn” in terms of their success which even Jackson had been unable to replicate with The Hobbit trilogy.
Burke says he understood fans being protective of “beloved source material”, but the views of a minority of toxic fans should not be overrepresented.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power screens on Prime Video.
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